1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of material removing tools, and in particular, to saw blades having gullets spaced along the periphery thereof, the gullets being sized and shaped to form indicia corresponding to an aspect of the tool.
2. Background Information
Common material removal tools include cutting and abrasive tools such as saw blades, abrasive saw blades, and core drill bits, which are widely used on conventional power saws and grinding machines. These tools are often circular, and configured for being centrally mounted on a machine spindle for operational rotation thereabout. Other such tools, such as band saw blades and the like, are configured for being driven around a pair of pulleys. All of these tools tend to be configured for uni-directional material-removing movement relative to a workpiece.
Such tools have often been provided with peripheral gullets or gullet-like indentations (i.e., voids) to provide functions such as debris (e.g., swarf) removal, cooling, and stress relief, during operation. Gullets/voids have also been used in grinding and sanding wheels to provide visual access to the workpiece during operation, such as disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. No.: 09/796,941 to Conley, et al., filed on Mar. 2, 2001, entitled Abrasive Wheels With Workpiece Vision Feature.
The uni-directional nature of many of these tools generally necessitates proper installation on the machine. The requisite directional orientation is often not easily apparent to casual or even experienced users by a simple visual inspection of the tool itself. For this reason, the proper directional orientation of the tool is often printed, painted, or otherwise marked directly on the tool, to facilitate proper installation. Additional markings, including trademark, trade dress, or other source of origin elements, are also often affixed directly to the tool in a similar manner. Disadvantageously however, such indicia is often worn away or otherwise removed during tool operation, to complicate the proper identification of orientation and/or source of origin of the tool. This may lead to improper re-installation in the event the tool is removed from the machine, and may lead to fewer re-orders due to a failure to properly identify the source of origin of the tool.
Thus, a need exists for an improved cutting/abrasive tool that addresses the aforementioned drawbacks.